Matching invoices to orders and receipts, with a person signing off.

The problem

Supplier invoices arrived in a shared inbox in a dozen formats. Each one had to be matched against a purchase order and a delivery record in the finance system, and any difference in price, quantity or date had to be queried with the supplier. The matching was routine. The chasing was slow, because every query had to be written from scratch, and the evidence lived in three places.

The team wanted the routine matches to stop taking their day, and the exceptions to arrive with everything they needed to decide.

What we built

An agent that watches the inbox, reads each invoice, finds the matching purchase order and delivery record in the finance system, and compares them line by line.

• Where everything agrees within the tolerances the finance lead set, the invoice goes to an approval queue with the match shown.
• Where something differs, the agent drafts a query to the supplier, attaches the evidence, and puts it in an exceptions queue for a person to send or amend.
• Nothing is posted to the ledger and nothing is paid. The agent prepares; the team approves.

It runs inside the client's own cloud tenancy, connected to the finance system through the permissions the team already had.

Controls

• Approval on every item. No invoice is posted without a named person approving it in the queue.
• Tolerances set by the finance lead. Price, quantity and date thresholds live in a settings page the team controls.
• Full log. Every read, match, draft and approval is recorded, with the documents it used.
• No automatic payment. The agent has no access to payment runs.
• Rollback. Any approval can be reversed before posting, and the reversal is logged.
• Data stays in the tenancy. No invoice data leaves the client's cloud account.

Outcome

Routine matches moved from the team's working day to a review queue they clear in one sitting. Exceptions now arrive with the invoice, the order, the delivery record and a drafted query side by side, so the decision takes minutes rather than a chain of emails. The audit trail is more complete than it was under the manual process, because every match is recorded with its evidence.

The team runs the system themselves. We monitor it and report monthly.